Judah M. Cohen. Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 318 pp.

Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack opens with a bold mission: to restore both scholarly and musical attention to an eclectic but little-known repertory of mid- to late nineteenth-century synagogue music produced, published, and sung in the United States. Today, Cohen observes, cantors and scholars alike often casually dismiss this music as lacking musical quality, a poor imitation of better-known European counterparts. Recent scholarship on American Jewish musical practices has focused far more attention on the sound worlds of east European Jewish immigrants on the East Coast. Nevertheless, Cohen illustrates how, during the roughly six decades covered in this book, 1840–1900, German-speaking Jews in Cincinnati and the Midwest, together with their colleagues on the East Coast, undertook a vast array of musical activity, composing and performing within the synagogue and further afield and debating the appropriate styles and functions of Jewish music.